design question

[Fredrik Linder]

Hi Vlad

I would go for the many processes variant, a few hundred processes is not
much in erlang terms. If it makes the design clearer then what's the
problem?

Though I am interested, what do you intend to benefit from a message passing
manager that you do not get for free with the message passing build in into
erlang? You could possibly write a server wrapper to gen_server or something
to hide the message passing between regions.

Unless each region has its own implementation I wouldn't worry about the
debugging. You would probaly soon very clearly see what is going on in your
system using a combination of erlang trace and disklog (that's what we're
currently using.).

Btw erlang trace is great!

Best Regards
/Fredrik

----- Original Message -----
From: "Vlad Dumitrescu" <vlad_dumitrescu@REDACTED>
To: <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2002 10:42 AM
Subject: design question


> Hi all,
>
> I have a design decision to make and I feel it would be beneficial with
some
> more and qualified opinions.
>
> The data structure is an ordered set of entities (=regions), with rather
> heavy cross-referencing between them. Each is related to an owner process
> and messages will go between the regions (conceptually).
>
> The first idea was to implement the regions as own processes, because the
> design is clearer and seems to be easier to see what's going on. On the
> other hand, it would be somewhat more difficult to debug and there are
quite
> a lot (hundreds) of these regions alive (although not more than a few
active
> at a time).
>
> The other solution is to implement a manager process that will handle the
> message passing on behalf of the regions. The handling of the data woud be
> more complicated, though.
>
> It isn't easy to switch between the paradigms, so I thought I'd try to
> choose before starting. I don't have experience with systems with that
many
> long-lived processes running, so I am not sure how the system would behave
> with some 100's of regions and some tenths of owners...
>
> I look forward to hearing *your* opinion! Thanks!¨
> Best regards,
> Vlad
>
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